Like Buffett, This Money Manager Swears Voracious Reading Is The Key To Success

As a teenager in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pamela Rosenau would spend hours poring over The Wall Street Journal with her dad when he came home from running his water cooler business. She would pick out stocks that looked promising and they'd sit down and comb through the company's annual reports and financial statements together, dissecting their margins and growth.

Rosenau, a financial advisor at HighTower Advisors who now manages a little over $1 billion for 230 clients and ranks 7th on our Top Women Advisors list, began investing money from her summer jobs at the age of 15. Her first stock pick was Resorts International, a casino operator that got into the Atlantic City gambling scene at ground zero, and doubled in value. Her budding portfolio eventually threw off enough cash to pay for business school at Emory University.

This insatiable appetite for knowledge ("I've always loved being a detective and ferreting out opportunities") has continued to this day. Rosenau, 57, blocks out four hours every afternoon to read 500 pages of research from her condo in downtown Los Angeles. (Legendary investor Warren Buffett once said that the key to success was reading 500 pages a day.) She finishes around dinnertime and then picks up a nonfiction book to wind down. "That relaxes me," she says.

On a recent sunny morning, Rosenau is getting ready to drive down the coast to Laguna Beach for a family reunion. She has three bags packed -- and they're filled with stacks of research materials. She doesn't plan to take a day off just because her family is flying in to visit her from across the country. "I'm working smarter but it's a full-time effort to do this well," says Rosenau, whose free time largely consists of walking her three dogs and serving on the board of an organic baby food company.

Rosenau studied theoretical mathematics as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College and started her career at Wertheim & Co. in the early 1980s. A series of acquisitions thrust her division under the ownership of Schroders and then Smith Barney before she jumped to UBS in 2006. In 2010, she was given the opportunity to develop the research department at HighTower Advisors. She relished the chance to interview research providers across the globe and cherry pick the best ones. "It was like going to a candy store and having a big purse," recalls Rosenau.

Over the years, she managed to avoid piling into Japanese stocks in the late 1980s, tech stocks ahead of the dotcom crash and financial stocks before the 2008 crisis. Now she's ignoring the Trump hype. "Investors need to focus on what the Fed does, not what Trump does," she says. With unemployment at a low 4.9% and already-stretched valuations in the stock market, she doesn't see the major indexes shooting much higher during Trump's presidency.

Rosenau has a vested interest in being right. She's always put her money to work in the market alongside her clients and her indoctrination into the business as a fiduciary taught her to act in the best interest of her clients. "Frankly that's a name that is perceived as somewhat new these days but I've been a fiduciary my whole career," she says.

Many of her well-heeled clients are in the financial industry themselves as Wall Street executives or fund managers. She takes particular pride in the clients that came to her from Bernie Madoff and whom she has made whole again. "I don't have children and so this is my legacy," says Rosenau.

And then there's the client she thought she had scared away. In 2010, Rosenau invited a prospective female client to drop off some paperwork at her home. Rosenau had a nurse coming by that morning to do some tests for HighTower's life insurance policy, but figured she would be done in time. Instead, Rosenau found herself sitting topless on her couch waiting to do a an EKG and a blood pressure test when the woman arrived early. Rosenau tried to play it cool and asked the woman if she could wait a few minutes for the nurse to finish up. Her blood pressure wouldn't cooperate, though, and the nurse had to repeat the test several times.

"I'm having a heart attack," says Roseanu, while the client sat there "non-plussed" and waited patiently. She ended up landing her business anyways. "Life is hilarious. I'll remember that story until my deathbed."